Bingo!

An automatic bingo player

Comment

Inspiration

Bingo is hard. B9... O66... G54... B3 G50 O70 N40 I28-B3-B6-B9-I20, oh man! You get distracted for the blink of an eye and you're stuck stressfully playing catch-up! What if a computer could keep track of our Bingo board for us? Could such a world really exist?

What it does

Bingo! works like this:

  1. Upload an image of your bingo board
  2. Crop it to show just those 25 beautiful squares of numbers
  3. Bingo! uses OCR to translate your image into a digital representation of the board
  4. Click "Start Listening", and Bingo! uses your microphone to listen for Letter-Number combinations, filling in your board accordingly and showing you the status of your board on the screen.
  5. When Lady Luck shines upon you and you reach a glorious BINGO!, Bingo!'s speech-synthesis will even announce "Bingo!"--no more getting sniped at the last minute by someone with the vocal reflexes of a Chickadee.
  6. You can also receive a text message notifying you that you've BINGO'ed, so you can play from afar and, at the last minute, dramatically dash back into the bingo parlor to declare your victory.

How I built it

OCRADjs for OCR, annyangjs for voice recognition, Javascript with jQuery to manipulate the DOM. Served up with the most basic of Express servers to avoid those weird cross-site security errors.

Challenges I ran into

I've never been too great at laying out a webpage so that it's visually interesting, so that was difficult here. I think I struck an O(67!)kay balance between aesthetics and functionality.

What I learned

I(29!) increased my knowledge of using jQuery and manipulating the DOM, as well as using CSS to lay things out prettily.

What's next for Bingo!

  • Manipulation of image contrast / brightness for improved OCR accuracy
  • Play multiple boards at once, to maximize your bingo triumph

Built With

  • javascript
  • optical-text-recognition
  • voice-recognition
Share this project:

Updates